Reading Notes: Native American, Part A

The Cloud That Was Lost

• high mountains
• clouds sleep on the top of peaks 
• trying to grow heavy enough to send down rain
• explains fog
• cloud got lost over flat land
• cloud started crying
• stretched itself out and gave flowers below color
• how the flower Wild Pholx got its soft colors that look like evening clouds

Grandmother River's Trick

• scared of other fish in the river
• Basically bully of the river
• ate and ate but were never hungy
• oh grandmother was river 
• she didn't like the bully fish 
• The river asked the cloud to create a flood
• Tricked the garfish to swim out of the river banks and explore where her water now touched
• was able to run and leave the gar fish in the little pools newly created

The plant that grows in trees

• mistletoe 
• only birds can reach the little white berries that only appear in both in summer and winter
• bird put it there once because it had pity on the mistletoe
• Thunderbird thanked the mistletoe for its berries 
• Misltoe tells the bird it will soon die
• Other animals feed on it in the winter causing it to die
• so bird takes misltoe up to tree so animals cant feed on it 
• And that is why the mistletoe keeps growing in the trees
  
  The thunder bird laughed and answered: "Oh, but I will see to that." The bird then wiped his long bill, to which stuck some of the berries of the mistletoe, on a limb. "See?" said the bird. "The berries stick on the limb. They will grow there, like you. And whenever other birds eat your berries they will wipe their bills as I do and the seeds of the mistletoe will continue to grow forever and ever."

Mistletoe

Web Source

Story source: When the Storm God Rides: Tejas and Other Indian Legends retold by Florence Stratton and illustrated by Berniece Burrough (1936).